The Misadventure of Dawn
by lucyolsen
Summary: Dawn's big misadventure includes a run-in with some otherworldly creatures, and a magic spell gone awry. First Person Dawn POV.  Everyone's living in Cleveland, post-Chosen


The Misadventure of Dawn   
  
by lucyolsen  
  
Summary:  Dawn's big misadventure includes a run-in with some otherworldly creatures, and a magic spell gone awry. First Person Dawn POV.  Everyone's living in Cleveland.  
  
Notes: Dawn annoys me. Yet, somehow, I wrote an entire fic in her POV. After I reread the fic, I realize that a lot of the internal Dawn actually sounds like things that Buffy would say. Maybe this is because Buffy, an adult, still uses teenspeak, while Dawn actually *is* a teen. There is a possible semi-planned prequel. Semi-planned, because while I have the premise for it, (and I hinted about it in the story), I have no ideas for the plot. In other words, I have an idea for a prequel, but it will probably never happen. But maybe it will, if you provide me with...  
  
Feedback: Yes, duh. (Oh look, I'm in character already.)  
  
***  
  
This is Cleveland, AKA The Hellmouth. Home of the Browns, Drew Carey, and all other things evil and hellish. Of all the ways I imagined I might die, most, if not all of them involved demons in some shape or form. Some scenarios were all about random vampire attacks, and don't think that that wasn't because Spike hadn't drilled those into my head during the Summer Without Buffy. "One Good Day" and all that rot, and God, I *still* talk like him! Like anyone with an ounce of intelligence would go tra-la-la'ing thought the cemetery at night in this town. Well, I did - in Sunnydale, at least - how else was I supposed to visit my best friend? I know better now though. I mean, I don't know not to troll the cemeteries after dark, because I still do that. I help with the Slaying. What I mean is that I know better than to think that a vampire could ever be a friend.  
  
Anyway, back to the story. I seriously thought that I would either die of old age or be killed by a demon, maybe even something totally lame like a mugging or a car accident, if Buffy would ever let me learn to drive, which she *so* will not. Hey, just because she drives like she's trying to use the car to commit assault with a deadly weapon, doesn't mean I will too. Xander drives me around all the time, and she doesn't worry that *he'll* get into an accident with me in the car. Maybe she thinks I inherited some Bad Driving Gene, or something. I mean, I was made from her, after all. But we both came from mom, and she drove fine, so in other words, I don't know *what* Buffy's problem is.  
  
Wow, I do tend to get distracted a lot, don't I?  
  
No, wait, rhetorical. You do know the meaning of the word, right?  
  
And hey, that question was rhetorical too!  
  
Anyway, I thought for sure I'd be killed by a demon...yadda, yadda...Not be abducted by aliens!  
  
What do you mean, did they really kill you? I'm standing right here talking to you, aren't I?  
  
Well, you're right. You never *can* tell in this city.  
  
So, I was abducted by aliens. You know, I thought that they just turned cows inside out and abducted farmers, but turns out they moved on from rural Middle America because everyone knew the stories and was getting suspicious of them. If they moved on to Cleveland, they did their research. They probably figured that with all the other crazy weird stuff that goes on here, no one would notice. It was a smart move, I guess, except for the fact that if they'd ended up my sister instead of me, she could slay them all. If she knew about them, which she doesn't, so don't tell her.  
  
So, I'm minding my own business, walking home from school, when suddenly I'm not.  
  
"Oh, great!" I said. "I thought I stopped being Buffy-bait when she stopped being the only slayer. Or do demons just love me that much?"  
  
Six little beady eyes stared back at me, blinking as if the two creatures they belonged to had no idea what on earth I was going on about.  
  
And they didn't, as I soon found out. And we weren't on Earth either. It apparently was a completely random abduction. And we were on a freakin' spaceship!  
  
So Pat, the shorter one, steps up, I'm calling it Pat because I don't think their species has males and females. I think they're...asexual? Is that the right word? They look kinda human shaped: two arms, two legs, three eyes, but they're yellow, like neon yellow, almost glow-in-the dark yellow. Come to think of it, it was *dark.* The aliens were the only light source I can think of and I could see them just fine. They also had these tentacles coming out the tops of their heads, sorta like D'argo, you know, from Farscape?  
  
Don't look at me like that! I lived with Xander for five months, remember?  
  
Anyway, tentacles like D'argo's, except they were blue and not latex-colored.  
  
Look, I *know* they improved the makeup from the first season. Xander wouldn't let me forget it!  
  
So Pat comes over and says "What's a Buffy? And we're not demons; we come from the Ziquiloupeious Sun System's Alpha III Sub-System, coordinates 3lk.sfg-9bv.wiu.6/87mn."  
  
"Oh, great! Aliens! At least don't give me an anal probe, pretty please?" I usually try to inject a little levity into a bad situation, with some bad humor. Lived with Xander for five months, remember? This time, though, I think it totally backfired.  
  
Because Jamie, the other one, says, "Anal Probe? You're female, right? I could think of a better place to probe."  
  
This, of course, freaked me out royally.  
  
But then Pat says "Don't mind him, Human. Our bodies aren't built like that." That's how I figured out that they were asexual. Or maybe they were just gay. "Besides," he went on to say, "We already did that study. That's not what you're here for."  
  
That freaking that I'd been doing? It was back.  
  
See, I lucked out. They weren't going to touch me in squicky ways; they were just going to torture me! Yay! See, apparently they had grant money to test the pain thresholds of alien species. They couldn't do too much to any one person because they didn't want to end up killing anyone. Paperwork, you know? So they took a bunch of people and assigned a different torture to each one. The people before me had gone through stabbings, burnings - the typical slice-n-dices. They told me that they'd saved the best, or worst, if were to look at it from my point of view, for last. And "the last", apparently, was me. They told me that they'd assigned me the worst torture imaginable and they couldn't wait to get started! I was so excited for them. And if you couldn't sense my actual tone when I said that, your sarcasm-dar is way off.  
  
I couldn't imagine what was worse than what those other people had gone through, so I tentatively asked them.  
  
"Cut off your stringy tentacles!" Is what Jamie replied.  
  
It took me a few seconds to realize they he meant my hair, because cutting your hair doesn't hurt all that much, not until you get to a mirror at any rate. But I had to play along with them, because I didn't want them to realize I wasn't in any pain, and have them assign me to some other kind of torture, or another study altogether.  
  
"You know," Jamie said, "It sickens me how much cosmetic surgery the people on your planet put themselves through. Your planet's people are never happy with the way they look. I've done my research. You probably know that the most common cosmetic surgery is tentacle shortening. Well, we want to do the procedure, but as an added bonus, we're not going to use any anesthesia!"  
  
I didn't have the heart to tell him we didn't use anesthesia anyway.  
  
You know that brat I used to be? Well, I decided I had to bring her back out. Apparently the tentacles on this species are the most sensitive things on their bodies. It wouldn't do any good for me to just sit there and bite my lip to make it look like I was trying not to scream. Unless I actually did scream, I wouldn't be believable at all. So, I decided I had to put on the show of a lifetime.  
  
They brought out the scissors, and I scrunched up my face in preparation. They snipped. I let out the screechiest, highest pitched sound I ever heard in my life.  
  
Yes, even higher than that sound that Chur'ak'wu demon made when we killed it last week.  
  
Yes, even higher than that sound that I made when the Chur'ak'wu grabbed me.  
  
I deserved an Emmy. And an Oscar. And possibly a Grammy, because I think my screams were music to their ears.  
  
They kept on snipping. I kept on screaming. I broke out into sobs. All part of the act.  
  
No, really. All Part of the Act.  
  
Then they were done snipping. I went on screaming, and sobbing a bit more for good measure. It went a bit like this:  
  
"I hate you!" SOB! "What did you do to me?" SCREAM! "Let me go, you Freaks!" SOB! "I want to go home!"  
  
And then suddenly, I was. Lying across my own comfy bed. Which is odd, considering that that wasn't where they took me from. I guess they had some mind-reading thing going for them. But I guess they got annoyed and didn't want me around anymore. That was the plan in the first place, I swear.  
  
I rolled out of bed and stood in front of the dresser mirror. Then I screamed, and this time it was no act. They'd done a total hack job on my hair! My heart rate sped up, and I began to hear my heartbeat pounding in my ears. Then I realized that it was just the sound of Buffy, pounding on the door.  
  
"Dawn!" she yelled. "Are you okay?"  
  
I yelled back through the closed door, "Yes Buffy, it was just a bad dream. I'm fine."   
  
"Okay Dawn," she replied. "I'll see you tomorrow." She tottered off to her room to sulk some more about her dead undead lover.  
  
I decided that if she couldn't manage to notice that I hadn't actually walked through the front door after school that afternoon, that I had been missing half the night and had just been teleported into my own bed, she didn't deserve to know!  
  
But how could I keep it from her?  
  
I mean the fact that my hair was a foot and a half shorter wouldn't escape her notice...even given how oblivious she is to All Things Dawn.  
  
Would she believe that I'd decided to take scissors to my own hair?  
  
Did I want it to *look* like I'd taken scissors to my own hair?  
  
No! I didn't!  
  
I could fix this!  
  
All I needed was a spell...  
  
So what if I'm not a witch? You think you need to bee a witch to cast a spell? Well, you don't. I learned the hard way not to read Latin around the books. And the Hellmouth, but that's a whole 'nother story.  
  
That I had to stay up the whole night, that was a given. That I could fall asleep the next day in class, well, that was a risk I was willing to take. Any day of the week, ugliness is exponentially worse than academic failure. Unless it makes you repeat a grade. Then academic failure is worse, because do you know embarrassing it would be to have to repeat a grade and be a year behind all your friends?  
  
Oh? You do? Sorry, then.  
  
Well, thank God Buffy had recognized the virtues of keeping a largish collection of magic and reference books, even though Willow's not living with us anymore, because I didn't feel like sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night.  
  
Well, it *is* a Hellmouth!  
  
And besides...someone could have seen me.  
  
So I snuck in the books that contained some glamours, then quickly realized that those wouldn't do; not unless I wanted to cast one every single day until my hair grew out! What I needed was something that would actually grow my hair, so that's what I looked for.  
  
And that's exactly what I found.  
  
I found it in a beginner's guide. I mean, it was a simple spell. So I cast it. No smelly herbs or animal bits necessary! Just a simple chant, and it was done.  
  
And it worked.  
  
I stood in front of the mirror and watched my recently hacked-up hair grow back to its normal length. So what if it was a little uneven? I'd just have to ponytail it the next day, until I got to a hairdresser, where I could get it trimmed.  
  
And then I started to feel a little...odd.  
  
And I looked down.  
  
And then I realized that hair also grows places other than on top of heads.  
  
I freaked. I wigged. And all those other thesaurus words? I can't remember them right now, but I was sure as hell doing them all.  
  
Then I calmed down a bit, and looked at the book again. There was no reversal for this particular spell, and the general reversal spell I found was the same piece of crap I knew didn't work from that last time a spell went screwy.  
  
I *knew* the title "Magic for Dummies" was just a bit too literal!  
  
So forget magic, I said to myself. Do what you do normally to get rid of unsightly hair.  
  
So I shaved. And shaved. And shaved some more.  
  
And it grew back every single time. I mean, I got done getting rid of the foot-long hair under one pit, and before I was halfway through the second pit, the first pit's hair had grown back to its full foot-long length!  
  
Oh. You don't want to hear the details then? Don't blame you.  
  
So then I said to myself...it's Willow time.  
  
I took my backpack with me, so Buffy would think that I went to school early. If she ever noticed that I wasn't home in the first place. And I walked the nine point four miles to Willow's apartment.  
  
Yes, nine point four. It was *that* worth it.  
  
I walked nine point four miles covered from head to toe. Head too, yes. I was having problems with my eyebrows and lashes. I remember thinking to myself, the sun isn't even up yet, and it's fall. How can it be this hot?  
  
But it *was* that hot. Kennedy told us that she slayed something in the sewers that was making the sidewalk hot enough to fry an egg on, and the air above the ground almost as bad.  
  
Not that I would fry an egg on the sidewalk, cuz that's just...ew.  
  
So I walked nine point four miles, covered from head to toe, in really, really hot weather.  
  
Yes, "really, really." I'm not thesaurus girl, okay?  
  
So I finally made it to Willow's, and I knocked on the door. Kinda quietly, because I didn't want to wake the neighbors. Occurs to me that I'd probably wake Willow, but hey, serious problem here, she'd understand.  
  
And wouldn't laugh too much, I hoped.  
  
Willow opened the door, groggy-eyed and just plain tired, and peeked outside.  
  
"Hello? Can I help you?" Then she seemed to realize something and said, "Do you have any idea what time it is?"  
  
It took me a few moments to realize why she couldn't recognize me. Covered from head to toe, remember? Willow was probably wondering what the hell a young Muslim girl was going at her door a six thirty in the morning.  
  
"Willow, it's me," I said.  
  
"Dawn? What are you doing here? And why are you dressed like that?"  
  
"All valid questions," I replied. "And I'll answer them all as soon as I'm inside."  
  
Willow stepped aside and let me through the door. I walked past her and made my way to the living room.  
  
I didn't sit down, though. That was...uncomfortable for me at the moment.  
  
"So," Willow said. "What's going on?"  
  
So I lied. I didn't want it getting back to Buffy about what really happened, because then she'd get all weepy and teary-eyed about what a bad, terrible, no good sister she is, and she'd stick to me like glue and need to know exactly where I was going to be every second of every day, just so she could show what a good sister and/or mother she was being. That would only last about a week, before she again completely forgot that I even existed, but hey, that was plenty long enough.  
  
I told her I had my hair cut today and I didn't like it, so I cast a spell to grow it back and can you please fix this?  
  
After the short mandatory lecture about using magic for frivolous things, (Yes Tara, and you can't say anything because you didn't see the hack job that was my hair), Willow explained to me what I had done wrong.  
  
See, apparently you couldn't reverse a spell like this one, because it was ongoing. I mean, a reversal spell in this case, if it would work, which it wouldn't, would make my nice, shiny, long hair, short again, and I *so* didn't want that. What I needed was to do a spell that would just simply stop the current one from doing what it was doing. Say to it, "Good job, that looks perfect just the way it is, now please stop."  
  
"See Dawn," she said. "The natural state of your hair is to grow at a normal rate. It's the spell you cast that's causing all the crazy quick hair growth in unseemly places."  
  
So she stood me up straight and said to me "Let the spell be broken."  
  
Well, gee, I thought, I could've done *that.*  
  
But see, that was the easy part. The hard part was doing all that hair removal again. Usually, you know, fifteen minutes a day, twenty, tops. Sometimes none, when it's the dead of winter and you're going to be wearing pants anyway.  
  
But let it add up like that? It took six hours. And I owe Willow three brand-new disposable razors and two entire cans of shaving cream.  
  
And I *swear* that's why I missed school yesterday.  
  
the end. 


End file.
